Cities across the world bank on attracting wealthy individuals. In East Africa, the economic turmoil of the 2025 cuts in USAID funding not only resulted in the loss of medical supplies and maternal health support to poorer communities, it significantly reduced the availability of US dollars in national economies, in part through fewer well-paid aid workers and consultants. With only a burgeoning middle class in many East African countries, these aid and development workers are the sort of wealthy individuals that fast-growing African cities seek to attract, replicating an economic model of urban planning and city-building found across the globe. Offices for white collar workers, high-end flats and apartments and the corresponding parking spaces and restaurants all generate opportunities for construction and taxation. Now, as a result of cuts to global funding, locally initiated, community-based economic models are proving ever more important to the resilience of East African towns and cities. It is a pertinent reminder that innovation and alternative economic structures often require a disaster to be fully reimagined and realized.
The final line of The Menace of Prosperity undermines the brilliance of this detailed and timely text. Wortel-London has thoughtfully articulated 227 pages of history, with the presumed intention of challenging the urban planning and economic norms that dominate city building in the USA and around the world. The opportunity presented in The Menace of Prosperity is that New York’s economic and urban planning systems do not have to rely on wealthy individuals for growth, but can be reimagined through planning policies that prioritize social well-being. The author has crafted, in sometimes overwhelming detail, the answer to the question ‘How did we get here?’, provoking the reader with a primer on historical analysis to prompt a different possibility for the future. Yet, the final line of his conclusion belies the entire project with a throwing up of hands as to who might make this fiscal reimagination a reality, and how and where it will be possible.
The ‘who’ of the reimagination is central to the argument. At one level, the author knows this. He has woven into his manuscript influential people articulating a range of views on the question of how you design, finance and build a city. The fiscal reimaginers and their capacity to implement are absolutely central to the story of change, whether in communities in East Africa, in nineteenth-century America or modern-day New York.
The second half of the book references activists, including Jane Jacobs and Black communities in Harlem who in the 1950s and 1960s organized to see the outworking of Black Power and anti-colonialism for urban neighbourhoods. The former is framed as a dynamic thinker whose ideas were largely ineffective or co-opted and de-fanged, and who had a ‘general hostility toward public planning’ (p. 178). This is despite the clear systemic challenges facing a woman in the 1950s whose reimagination of cities was quickly dismissed and undermined by the urban planning elite. The latter, more favoured, group is revealed to have made bold attempts to implement change, stymied in part by individual Black business owners who see no reason not to emulate the system that made white people rich – and who can blame them in the face of generational discrimination. Wortel-London identifies the ease with which white, pro-tax liberals are able to pick-off the black businesses as useful to perpetuating the existing system, thus undermining ‘radical’ community efforts. Though these individuals and groups are rightly recognized as marginalized, there is limited reference to the fact that they are consistently and persistently blocked by planning and economic and broader social systems designed to retain wealth, power and the status quo. To reimagine without overwhelming frustration requires the space and opportunity to implement.
For some, the possibility of implementing a new fiscal imagination is reignited by the recent election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York. Yet, Mamdani is an anomaly. His capacity to create change is because he operates within the rigid structures, rather than outside of them. Wortel-London describes the increased powers of the office of the Mayor during the nineteenth century, in part as a result of the popular, often property owning, vote that was introduced in 1834. That the Mayor currently has the capacity to challenge existing systems is because the system allows him to do so.
For someone who seeks to inspire a reimagination of possibility, the author fails to fully apply the impact of entrenched systems on the uphill battle of activists as they seek change. Wortel-London provides incredibly detailed, sometime circuitous, descriptions of the ways that economic systems have become narrow, limited and more inevitable than they were during the Georgists’ late nineteenth-century campaigns. The weight of city-wide debt and property-favouring policies to garner votes, combined with property owners’ expectations for infrastructure improvements, all created a financial bind on the city. This was all justified on the basis of increased tax opportunities, and only questioned in times of downturn and recession. In later years, speculative land owners pushed for white-collar work to dominate central Manhattan with the support of federal funding, an extension of the belief that attracting wealthy people was vital to growth. This resulted in layer upon layer of people and systems that had too much to lose through reimagination, which in turn fused with broader social inequalities to prevent change.
Necessary innovation, which always emerges from those most disenfranchised, is stymied by the very layers of history and infrastructure development that Wortel-London sets out in his early chapters. He provides timely challenges to urban planners and historians in his conclusion, but still, the power sits with planners who listen to marginalized voices within the context of the existing system, rather than in greater funding and opportunity for people on the edges who have no choice but to find a different way. This historical account assures us that the horror of economic crisis provides the most likely upheaval to embedded norms and a rethinking of urban planning. That Mayor Mamdani has managed to become part of the system to change it, may be the better hope.
